"Pretty girls like you get lost in these woods all the time, Alexa."
On the night of Sebastián's annual Beginning of Summer Bash, amiable and adventurous Melody Tryniski went missing. What might have appeared as a juvenile escapade - a casual incide...
Levittown's commercial area September 10, 2018 1:11 p.m.
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THERE'S A DARKNESS IN Levittown.
It lives among us, a heavy weight that clings to the town's atmosphere, adhering to it like a second nature. Even as a little girl, I could sense a shifting in the ambience, a certain something that dictates how people should behave and how the town should be perceived. Its presence is palpable and comes in the form of glaring eyes, words of hate, and death.
Murder, if you want to retrieve the cloth of lies from it to reveal what horrors lie underneath.
The darkness isn't exclusive to the atmosphere, it's part of us too. It resides within us as the ultimate desire of the human being, our human nature - the boiling of the blood, the swelling of the veins, the closing of a fist, the palpitations of the heart. Aggression. Rage. Lust. It has a variety of names, but it can only be named as it is perceived.
If it comes to us, we don't know what to name it; we mostly just ignore this aching necessity to destroy, to cause chaos, watch the world burn with a smile on our faces as we invite the darkness to grow.
This darkness - it creates monsters.
Everyone knows about it, they can feel its presence as much as I do, but we don't let it consume us. At least, I don't let it consume me; they do whatever they want.
This town thrives on the intimidation of others. It's like a sick game that's only amusing to those who participate in it. Maybe today my hair is too curly, my skin too dark, my ass too big.
I never know. The comments usually come as a surprise.
This unknown entity could've blossomed out of the killings that took place ten years ago, in 2008. In the span of two months, W.S. raped and murdered twenty-five girls, all in their late teens. People often describe him as handsome but troubled: an angelic face, a twitch of insanity in his eyes, a devilish grin. It's disturbing how they focus on both his physical appearance and his notorious crime, instead of honoring the girls he so violently ripped from their own lives.
It's absurd to have our own serial killer, to treat the matter as our prized possession.
The thing about him is, as with all other serial killers, he had a fetish: teen girls with curly hair and dark skin. I could've been one of them, had I been older in 2008. The thought of it causes a rush of nausea to swirl inside my stomach, all of my insides freezing for as long as the possibility stays in my mind. This event is abhorrent, it reflects the darker side of Levittown. I don't know much about it, only what the rumors say, and what my father says, and what my friends say.
It's a he says, she says, they say, type of situation.
People are so mesmerized by psychotic serial killers, so determined to decipher how their strange minds work, but only if the murders happened thirty or so years ago and as far away from them as possible. We entertain ourselves by watching documentaries about them, their lives, their habits and the breaking point that led them to their inevitable, gruesome futures. We know the names Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, W.S., but we often forget the victims. We love reading mystery novels, the kinds in which we pretend to be detectives to catch a murderer. But when it happens in real life, it causes terror, panic, chaos. It's no longer entertaining, a thing of the past, something that can't reach us.
